Knowledge Centre blogs

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 29th May 2012

We all know capturing social impact is difficult, especially when you’re developing new models and trying new approaches. That’s how we all justify spending so long talking about it ;-)

If you’re working with a consistent cohort of individuals over a significant period of time then you can roll out all the nice traditional pre and post measures to track their progress. But, real life’s not generally like that. If you’re working with hard to reach clients sporadically or intermittently, how do you go about capturing and assessing the impact of the work?

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How do funders measure success, especially when a traditional funding model just doesn't cut?

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 13th April 2012

One of the questions that should keep any funder awake at night is: are we doing the best that can be done with the money?

Answering this naturally leads any funder to ask how do we measure our success?

On one level they can obviously reflect on the work of the projects they fund or partner with. After all, a core measure of success is what happens with the money. But in a wider sense, funders work in different ways and so to understand their effectiveness there has to be an understanding of the strengths or weaknesses of their funding model. For example, are they all about supporting the continuation of work by existing organisations? Or are they an early stage investor who tries to get new ideas off the ground? In this case, how do you measure success when you're starting up new projects? more >

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I would never have thought archiving would be quite such a fascinating thing.. .

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 7th March 2012

You, like me, probably think of archiving as towers of dusty books locked away in a bomb proof basement somewhere, solely of interest to aged historians. You might also think that this is a long way from the world of open data, however today I’ve discovered that they may be inextricably linked.

This is all thanks to Andrew Cooper, Research Manager at The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund who held a fantastic event today with Jack Meyers, President of the Rockefeller Archive Centre to talk about archiving in foundations.

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The feedback loop that keeps on (Globally) giving

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 14th February 2012

In my last post RCTs should only be part of the story I argued that:

We need to accept that different types of evaluation are suitable for programmes at different stages of development
A crucial role of evaluation is to create formative feedback loops not just summative snaps shots

So if you’re working in a space where you have lots of pilot projects testing new ideas, and are interested in how you get continuous evaluation of more >

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RCTs should only be part of the story

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 13th February 2012

I love evidence based interventions. In fact if I am arguing with my girlfriend about something other than the washing up, one of the first things I do is ask, what’s the evidence for that? (Which I am sure makes me an absolute joy to live with).

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Evaluation...lost in translation?

By: Kieron Kirkland
On: 30th January 2012

In my last post, The quest for the holy metric? I argued that the heart of the shared measurement issue in social development is not an evaluation problem, it’s a translation problem. What we really want to know is how can I translate the social value that I have captured into a language that you understand so that you value the work too? more >

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Project blogs

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Area of interest

(-) Monitoring and Evaluation
Open data (2)
Education (1)
Other (1)

Internet focus

(-) Open innovation

Authors

(-) Kieron Kirkland